Self-possession and the Folly of Idolatry

Leave a comment

Luke Timothy Johnson’s book Sharing Possessions (Eerdmans, 2011) has one of the most searching and profound discussions of idolatry that I have ever come across.  I hope to be sharing more from this extraordinary book in the weeks to come, but for now, here’s one powerful and convicting passage that every Christian should read:

“Some questions like the following may help us get the point: What is it, really, that enables us to get up and face each day’s activity? What is it that we will make room for during the day, no matter how busy our schedule? By what measure do I look back over the day, or week, or year, and consider it a success or a failure? In the daily round, is the high point the end of work and the beginning of leisure? The first drink? Is that which I will fit into my schedule no matter what my three-mile jog? When I lie awake in my bed with a feeling of discontent, is it because I did not get done all the work I intended to do that day, or did not get some time to myself, or did not spend time with my children and wife, or looked foolish in a conference, or dread facing a job interview tomorrow? When I look at others of my own generation, as I suspect we all do, and think about ‘where I am’ in my life, what measurement do I use? Do I think of myself as a success or failure in relation to others, and on what basis—my health, my wealth, my work (process or product), my fame, my family, my power over others, my good looks? These are not complicated questions, but they are, for most of us, difficult ones, for they have a way, cumulatively, of locating our center. . . . For, if idolatry is a functional phenomenon, the real question comes when I ask, ‘Where is it that the meaning and power of my individual human life is sought? In what or where do I seek my sense of worth and identity? What is it, seen or unseen, which is the “bottom line” for me, the source of my hope? What is it without which life would not be worth living? What is it for which I move and act, without which I stumble and fall? What gets me depressed? What is it, in my actual life, that functions as my god?’

 

Read More

No Mercy: Cartwright on the Death of Jesus and the Death Penalty

2 Comments

Among the most disturbing passages in Thomas Cartwright’s Second Replie to the Answer of the Admonition, which, it must be confessed, rarely makes for edifying reading, and still more rarely for pleasant reading, is the lengthy section in which he undertakes to argue that not only are the death penalties of the Mosaic law still legitimate, but they are in fact strictly required of the Christian magistrate.  He is particularly interested in showing this with regard to adulterers blasphemers, and idolaters (worrisome because of how many people Cartwright would class in the latter two categories), all groups that John Whitgift had argued that the New Covenant magistrate had liberty to spare from death.

Cartwright begins, arguing that Christ’s sacrifice was intended merely to deliver from spiritual death, not corporal death, and hence in no way affected the temporal penalties which should belong to evildoers:

“It remaineth to show that there are certain judicial laws which cannot be changed, as that a blasphemer, contemptuous and stubborn idolator, etc., ought to be put to death.  The doctrine which leaveth this at liberty, when they can allege no cause of this looseness but the coming of our Saviour Christ, and his passion, faulteth many ways.  And first, it is a childish error to think that our Saviour Christ came down to exempt men from corporal death, which the law casteth upon evildoers; whenas he came not to deliver from death, which is the parting of the body from the soul, but from that which is the separation both of body and soul, from the gracious presence of the Lord.  And if it were not that our Saviour Christ had born in his own body this civil punishment of public offenders, it must follow thereupon not (which the Doctor [Whitgift] fancieth) that ‘it is in the liberty of the magistrate to put them to death’ but that he must, will he, nill he (if they repent) kepe them alive.  For if our Saviour Christ hath answered that justice of God in his law, whereby he hath commanded that such malefactors should be put to death, it should be great injustice to require that again in the life of the offender.”

Whitgift’s argument, in other words, proves too much, for if the death of Christ should make any difference at all for these judicial laws, it should be one that requires that mercy be shown, rather than merely permitting it.  (Whatever one thinks of the logic of this argument here, it is a typical move for Cartwright, who can almost never think in terms of permission—God either requires, or forbids.)  Cartwright goes on to argue, further, that Whitgift’s argument would make Christ’s sacrifice into a foolish thing indeed, since by inviting temporal mercy toward sin, he would encourage more evildoing:

“Again, this opinion is injurious unto the death and whole appearing of the Son of God in flesh.  For where he appeared for this cause, that he might destroy sin, which is the work of the Devil, the Answerer [Whitgift] in his imagination of choice, which he leaveth to the Magistrate touching the putting of such horrible offenders to death, doth at unawares as much as in him lieth make our Saviour Christ build again that kingdom of sin which he hath destroyed.  For when both in common reason and by the manifest word of God before alleged, the Lord giveth this blessing unto the punishment of such grievous offenders by death, that others not only which see but also which hear of them have the bridle of fear put upon them, whereby they are withholden from the like crimes; it must needs follow that whosoever maketh our Saviour Christ author of this looseness in punishing such offenders, maketh him forthwith to lose the bridle whereby others are stayed from throwing themselves down the hill of wickedness which was before committed.  And what is this if this be not to make our Saviour Christ a troubler commonwealths?”

Cartwright concludes by insisting that God has put the sword into the hand of magistrates not to permit them to use it, but to require that they use it, whenever it is called for, without mercy:

“In that the Apostle putteth a sword in the hand of the Magistrates, and in the use of it maketh him a  Minister and servant of the vengeance and justice of the Lord against sin; he striketh through this opinion which imagineth that our Saviour Christ came to hang the sword of the Lord’s justice upon the pleasure and will of men.  For the magistrate being the Lord’s officer, as the Sheriff is the Magistrate’s, it is no more in his choice to withhold the sword, which the Lord hath put in his hand to draw, then in the power of the Sheriff to stay the execution of that judgment which the magistrate himself hath lawfully commanded.  Now seeing there is a sword in the Magistrate’s hand by the doctrine of the Apostles, and that also which the magistrate must of duty draw, I would gladly know of the Answerer where that necessity can be found if it be not in these crimes of blasphemy, etc., which I have set down?”

This last part is really the crucial bit, manifesting as it does Cartwright’s conviction that God never, if he can help it, leaves humans, particularly authorities, at liberty to do as reason and prudence might dictate, but meticulously defines their responsibilities in advance.  What kind of God would he be, Cartwright asks rhetorically, if he left us to our own devices?  

 

It is this conviction which leads Cartwright to a classic theonomist stance regarding the continuing validity of the Old Testament civil laws, one which departs radically from that of earlier Protestant reformers.  I hope to explore this issue, in particular Cartwright’s fascinating distortion of Calvin’s language about the “general equity” of the Mosaic laws, in a subsequent post next week. 

Recognizing Political Idolatry

1 Comment

If the human heart is a veritable factory of idols, as Calvin said, then it might be fair to say that theologians see themselves as the factory inspectors, called upon to discern and denounce idolatries wherever they may be found.  Sometimes, however, we are too content merely to take a superficial look at the packaging well after the product has entered widespread circulation, instead of venturing into the factory to see what’s really going on.  Or, to drop the belabored metaphor, sometimes we are overly tempted to identify an idol merely by certain external characteristics rather than by whether it actually rules our hearts as such.  This is a particular temptation in political theology, where critics on both left and right are eager to identify Christian idolatries of the state.  

The right will tell us that we can recognise idolatry by asking whether the state claims to provide goods which only God can provide.  The modern state, we are told, is an overgrown Leviathan, one that presents itself as the saviour from all evils, the solution to all ills, as our modern Messiah.  Whenever someone suggests then that the solution for an economic crisis lies in state intervention, or that state action might remedy economic injustice, or perhaps that the state should be involved in ensuring universal access to healthcare, up goes the cry, “Idolatry!”  God has fixed particular, extremely narrow boundaries to the legitimate intrusion of political authority, we are told, and to ask anything else from the government is to substitute it for God himself.   

Critics on the radical left have their own version of this rhetorical move, one on display frequently in the writings of William Cavanaugh.  For instance, in Migrations of the Holy, Cavanaugh says, 

“The problem, as MacIntyre notes, is that the nation-state presents itself as so much more, as the keeper of the common good and repository of sacred values, so that it demands sacrifice on its behalf. . . . In a bureaucratic order whose main function is to adjudicate struggles for power between various factions, a sense of unity is produced by the only means possible: sacrifice to false gods in war.  The nation-state may be understood theologically as a kind of parody of the church, meant to save us from division.”  

This particular statement of Cavanaugh’s concern is in fact fairly rhetorically restrained , but the suggestion here, voiced more vigorously elsewhere, is that we may readily discern the idolatry of the state in its call for people to lay down their lives for it, or, even more so, in its call for people to kill others for its sake.  In The Myth of Religious Violence, he thinks it quite significant to point out that very few modern Christians would be willing to kill for the sake of their church, but most would be quite willing to kill for the sake of their country.  Since human life is a good of infinite value, any entity which claims the right to take human life or require its sacrifice is demanding what only God can demand, and is thus idolatrous.

 

The most striking problem with both of these arguments (in their more simplistic forms, at any rate) is that, if they are true, then not merely we moderns, but the majority of the Christian tradition, can be indicted of idolatry.  Most Christian ethicists through the ages have felt quite able to justify, on clear theological and ethical grounds, both the taking of life by the state and the sacrifice of life in its defence.  They have also felt quite able, on clear theological and ethical grounds, to call for the Christian magistrate’s involvement in any number of areas of concern—not only military and judicial, but economic, social, and religious—as part of his protection of the common good and vindication of justice.  

No doubt, there are a great many ways in which modern politics might be indicted for idolatry, and to be sure, both of the arguments I have just summarized can be and have been offered in more sophisticated and compelling forms.  But if we wish to aptly identify the pathologies of modernity, we must go beyond facile claims that certain political actions in and of themselves necessarily constitute forms of idolatry, and must rather ask whether the fundamentally provisional character of these political actions is being maintained, or whether we have passed over into investing them with a significance and finality which no human action can bear (though certainly, part of this will involve attending to the kinds of actions that are being taken and called for).  On this point, O’Donovan’s remarks in chapter 3 of Resurrection and Moral Order are worth reflecting carefully upon:

“The opposition in Western theology between the City of God and the earthly city has enabled political thought to avoid theocratic conceptions of government, which, by claiming to express the rule of heaven on earth, must unify the earthly and the heavenly into a single totalitarian political claim.  Western theology starts from the assertion that the kingdoms of this world are not the kingdom of our God and of his Christ, not, at any rate, until God intervenes to make them so at the end.  If we ask why not, the answer must surely be that their judgments cannot reconcile the world; thus they can neither be perfectly true nor perfectly merciful.  Their sovereignty can be only a relative sovereignty; and the believer, who knows himself subject to the absolute sovereignty of God’s reconciling judgment, keeps his spiritual ‘space’ in relation to them, just as they keep a certain ‘space’ of their own in relation to the judgments of God.  This does not mean (as it has sometimes come to mean in degenerate forms of the tradition) that the secular state can be independent of God and his claims, or that the pious individual can cultivate a private existence without regard for the claims of his society.  It means simply that earthly politics, because they do not have to reconcile the world, may get on with the provisional task of bearing witness to God’s justice.  And it means that the individual, because he is not absorbed by the claims of his earthly community, can contribute to its good order that knowledge of man’s good which he learns from his heavenly calling.”

Honouring Mary as Protestants

53 Comments

Today was the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.  I probably would never have noticed the fact except that we happened to attend the local Anglo-Catholic church yesterday, and they were keen to make the most of the occasion.  Ironically, we had attended the same church precisely two years ago for the first time, venturing through its doors on the Feast of the Assumption in 2009, and finding ourselves rather alarmed when, at the end of the service, everyone turned toward us (we happened to be seated right by the statue of the Virgin) and began reciting the Ave Maria.  The experience prompted me to reflect a bit on the practice of praying to saints generally, and the precise nature of the Protestant objection thereto.* 

This time, I wanted to reflect more specifically on the practice of Marian devotion (not, though, on the dogma of the Assumption specifically), and how Protestants ought to approach it.  We Protestants certainly have a problem when it comes to Mary–so allergic are we to any sign of Marian devotion that we flip out and run the other way at any sign of it, including thoroughly orthodox phrases like “Mother of God” and “Hail Mary, full of grace.”  

The first phrase is of course part of the touchstone of orthodoxy the Definition of Chalcedon, and is the proper translation of Theotokos–the preferred Protestant version (for those who even bother to recite it) is “God-bearer,” but this unfortunately names not the orthodox doctrine, but the heresy of Nestorius that Theotokos was coined to contest. (Note that I do not count myself an expert in 5th-century Christological controversies, but this is my understanding based on what I have read on the subject; feel free to shed light on this if you have any.)  To call Mary the “Mother of God” was a truth that many Christians actually gave their blood and their lives to defend, and yet we Protestants have casually tossed it aside because it sounds icky and Catholic.   

Likewise, the first part of the Ave Maria is of course straight from the Gospel of Luke: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you…. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”  And yet I found that the words caught in my throat during the service, as if I was saying something idolatrous.  I daresay most Protestants could not even imagine reciting these words, unless they happened upon them while reading aloud Luke ch. 1.

 

In this, as in so many other such things, there are two warring impulses that it is hard to reconcile–the call to purity and the call to unity.  On the one hand, we might be inclined to say that even those sorts of Marian devotion that are not in themselves idolatrous nevertheless are so prone to become so, and so often have, that we must lean in the opposite direction, and steer clear of the whole notion of honouring Mary, lest we should thereby dishonour God.  Therefore we must be on guard even against forms of devotion that on paper seem legitimate, lest there lurk within them an idolatrous spirit.  On the other hand, we might say that we are supposed to seek unity with Christian brothers and sisters in everything that we possibly can do, in everything that is not in itself wrong, and that includes seeking unity with the Church of past generations.  For almost as long as the Church has existed, it has held Mary in a place of special honour, and seen fit to show that honour liturgically.  No doubt Marian devotion has taken many harmful forms, but should we not defer to the consensus of many centuries of Christians that some kind of Marian devotion is appropriate and desirable?  Therefore we should seek to engage, together with Catholics, Orthodox, Anglo-Catholics, and long centuries of Christian practice, in whatever forms of Marian devotion that are not necessarily heretical, idolatrous, or what have you, and try to assume the best of forms that seem dubious or ambiguous.  

Having been so long exposed to the dominance of the first impulse, which on so many issues has had such a destructive Gnosticizing effect on Protestant churches, I am naturally inclined to try to give freer rein to the second impulse, but of course, balance is necessary.  So I wanted to think through a little more specifically what it is that might trouble us in a service like the one I attended on Sunday.  What forms of honouring Mary might prove to be idolatrous or heretical, etc., and as for the ones that don’t, is there any reason not to participate in them? 

 

First, though, let’s ask what the point should be of honouring Mary at all.  What do we mean by this notion?  Protestants are likely to react against the entire idea, for to honour Mary–a creature–seems like it must necessarily be a way of dishonouring God.  God only should be honoured, and no mere creature!  But this is a product of that Puritan impulse that I have recently been harping upon, the impulse which insists that grace is a zero-sum game**, that God can only be honoured at human expense; that mankind must be correspondingly humbled as God is exalted.  But of course, this is not what Scripture celebrates.  Scripture celebrates the fact that God has condescended to us, and lifted us up to share in his glory.  To celebrate the glories of an Abraham or a David or a Mary, or, most of all, the Church of which Mary has always been understood to be a symbol, is not to honour them for what they are in themselves, but to honour them as sites of God’s redemptive grace, as testaments to the incredible goodness of God that has seen fit to bestow honour on his creatures, to work in and through them as instruments of his purpose, and to raise them up to share with him in heavenly glory.  Rightly understood, then, this is what honouring Mary should be all about. 

 For where else do we find such a stupendous display of the mystery of grace?  In Mary, God took a lowly maiden who had done nothing at all but show faith in his promises, and not only made her the means for the redemption of the whole world, but actually came and made his home within her!  As such, she is a symbol of God’s grace toward all of us, the Church, which God has, through no merit of our own, made the agent of his redemptive purposes toward the world, and in whom he mysteriously dwells in the person of his Son.  In celebrating Mary, and her role in the history of redemption, we are not detracting from God, but rather celebrating the stupendousness of his grace; in honouring her, we are of course honouring Him.  After all, to call Mary “blessed” is of course to make the statement that she has been blessed–by God–and that we are in awe of the bounty of His blessings.

This is, of course, a rather Protestant way of describing it all.  No doubt a great many Catholics could agree with a great deal of what I just said, but certainly dogmas like the Immaculate Conception, the language of Co-mediatrix, and such teachings tend to obscure this notion that Mary is not honoured for anything special she did or anything special she was in herself, but for God’s grace exhibited to her and through her.  The Protestant suspicion that to honour Mary is not to honour her as a creaturely object of God’s benevolence, but as a quasi-transcendent subject somehow alongside God, is certainly not unfounded, having a basis not merely in bastardised Catholic practice but also in Catholic dogmatics.  

But if we are following the second impulse–the impulse of unity–then perhaps we will, even while holding such problematic notions and forms of devotion at arm’s length, heartily embrace formulations and practices that celebrate Mary as object and instrument of grace, Mary as a symbol of God’s grace toward all of us, Mary as the locus of the mystery of the Incarnation.

 

In that case, we should have no problem with hymns like this (which I sang on Sunday): 

Virgin-born, we bow before thee:
blessed was the womb that bore thee;
Mary, Mother meek and mild,
blessed was she in her Child.
Blessed was the breast that fed thee;
blessed was the hand that led thee;
blessed was the parent’s eye
that watched thy slumbering infancy. 

Blessed she by all creation,
who brought forth the world’s salvation,
and blessed they, for ever blest,
who love thee most and serve thee best.
Virgin-born, we bow before thee;
blessed was the womb that bore thee;
Mary, Mother meek and mild,
blessed was she in her Child.

Or even with hymns like:

Sing we of the blessed Mother who received the angel’s word, 
And obedient to the summons bore in love the infant Lord; 
Sing we of the joys of Mary at whose breast the child was fed 
Who is Son of God eternal and the everlasting Bread. 
[it continues in this vein for three more verses]

Or should we?  I expect most of us still would be super-nervous about these, especially the second. For to honour Mary theologically in the way I described might seem like one thing; to honour her liturgically quite another.  Indeed, Protestants have often made this sort of distinction.  We claim to have a high doctrine of creation, but many Protestants–at least Reformed Presbyterians, don’t like creation to play much of a role in worship, purging our churches of any kind of imagery.  While of course part of this might be legitimate avoidance of idolatry, more of it seems to be part of the same old Puritan fear that to honour God through his creations is to dishonour him.  More theologically sound, I think, is the kind of worship that a hymn like “All Creatures of Our God and King” displays–praising God through praising his works.   

And if we can worship him by praising his inanimate works like the sun and the moon, then why can’t we praise his infinitely greater works like the Virgin Mary and her story?  Again, perhaps it seems legitimate in principle, but we are liable to be suspicious that such worship will quickly have the effect of making the Virgin an object, not an avenue, of worship.  Certainly in some Catholic churches, where even devotion that might be prima facie legitimate is part of worship on a daily or weekly basis, this is a serious cause for concern. (Of course, I should add that based on my limited experience, most ordinary Catholic worship services do not feature displays of Marian devotion.)  But I’m not sure that this would be a fair objection for a church that merely sings such hymns a couple times a year on stipulated feast days, like the one where I was worshipping.  

 

Okay, so maybe we could justify all this thus far, and thus, for the sake of unity, and of respect for the historic Church, we should be happy to participate in this kind of worship.  But what about singing or praying to Mary?  After all, while it might’ve been fine for the angel to say “Hail Mary” or Elizabeth to say “Blessed are you among women,” they were looking at Mary when they said it.  We aren’t.  So why should we be addressing her in the second person singular in worship?  Isn’t that something we only do to God?  This seems quite a natural concern to have, and it does feel like you’ve crossed over some barrier when you go from saying “Sing we of the blessed Mother” to actually singing to the blessed Mother.  On the other hand, it is not true that our hymns are exclusively addressed to God.  A great many hymns are worded so that they are addressing one another, the communion of saints (e.g., off the top of my head, “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come”), or even addressing ourselves (“Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven”).  In fact, “All Creatures of Our God and King,” mentioned above, goes so far as to address the inanimate creation directly, calling on “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon” to praise God, and praising God for them.  This being the case, we may reasonably ask what is wrong with singing 

“Praise, O Mary, praise the Father, Praise thy Saviour and thy Son, 
Praise the everlasting Spirit, who hath made thee ark and throne;
O’er all creatures high exalted, lowly praise the Three in One.” (At least, assuming–the poetry is ambiguous–that it is the Three in One that is “o’er all creatures high exalted,” not Mary herself.)

In a context like this, the second-person singular can be understood as a poetic invocation no more polytheistic than the invocation of “Brother Sun.”  But of course, it often goes further than this.  Most Marian devotion is not merely poetically invoking her, but genuinely praying to her–or, at any rate, asking her to pray for us.  Of course, as I wrote two years ago, there is not necessarily any idolatry or heresy in the notion that we could call upon some deceased saint and ask them to pray for us, though we Protestants might well doubt whether there was any way they could hear us, and suppose that the practice, imputing to the dead in Christ godlike powers of prayer-hearing, would certainly lend itself to idolatry. So, while not wanting to consider all such “prayers” ipso facto idolatry, I would tend to personally draw the line here, and stop short of joining the congregation in “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

And then, of course, even beyond this are prayers or hymns to Mary that speak of her as someone not just with power to pray for us, but with power that sounds like it should be Christ’s alone–as in one anthem that the choir sang, which was mercifully in Latin: “Honour her that she may free thee from thy many sins.  Call on her, lest the storm of sins overtake thee.”  

 

When such genuinely idolatrous language is present in the service, it is of course reasonable to ask whether we ought not just to steer as clear as possible from the whole shady business, instead of going along as far as conscience permits.  On the other hand, it certainly seems that Protestants have impoverished their faith by completely excising from it any real consideration of Mary, and the disregard this shows for the faith of the early Church does not boost our credibility when we claim to be recovering that faith.  Finding the appropriate balance is sure to prove a difficult task, but continuing to neglect that task is not a responsible option.  

 

*You can read my post on prayers to the saints (though as what I say here suggests, I have retreated a bit fromt the ground I tried to stake out then) here.  

** For more on “the Puritan impulse” see here.

The God in the Manger

Leave a comment

At my wife’s suggestion, I recently dug up a little piece of “creative writing” I did a few years ago for Doug Jones’s Theology of the Body class. It’s a rewrite of a crucial section from Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, and although I’m not terribly fond of anything I wrote three years ago (and struck by how foreign the writing style is!), I hope it still makes for a fun and edifying Christmas meditation.

 

No more cows gurgling out their last breaths as their blood stains the marble altars. No more oxen led forth to the slaughter, dismembered to feed the god. The god is in the manger now, where the oxen come to feed.

The sun-browned Nile-dwellers in the kingdom of the pyramids slew their cows to appease that fireball in the sky and that lazy channel of brown water which sprawled across their sandy land. But not content with these lofty objects of devotion, they groveled on marble floors before their sacred cats or fish goddesses.

To their credit, many of these Egyptian idols were perhaps alive. What about the pagans of Palestine, who worshipped little clay idols or poles stuck in the ground? The Sidonians did homage to their favorite statue, Molech, by heating his iron hands red-hot and then bringing him an offering far more beautiful than any cow or pigeon. A young infant without blemish was carried into the slaughterhouse of the god so that the idol too could have a chance to hold the lovely child. The onlookers watched in religious ecstasy while the sounds of the baby’s screams mixed with the bacon-like sizzle of its smooth skin on the fiery iron. Perhaps the god liked the smell of bacon.

But at least they combined a healthy dose of masochism with their sadism. No one can accuse the priests of Baal with lack of religious fervour, dancing around in a drunken frenzy, lopping off bits of their flabby bodies and pouring out their blood on the parched earth in an impassioned plea for their god to pour out fire for them.

But the rational Greeks, in their clean white clothes and clean white temples with their nude white statues, surely their minds were set on things above? Hypocrites. They philosophized about the Good while their white temples ran red with the blood of bulls sacrificed to a serial rapist who turned his conquests into cows or shrubs. His brother was little better, kidnapping his niece to be his mistress in the Land of the Dead, and only turning her loose for a few months each year to make the flowers bloom and inspire nature with new life.

To all these pious pagans, blinded by their earthward gaze, God presented an image they could not ignore. God took on sinews, his veins ran with blood, and the earth which He had formed from nothing he now formed into Himself. Creation which had served as idols for the sons of men now took its proper place to serve the Son of Man. The flaming sun quenched its rays and put on robes of black to mourn his death; life-giving water poured from his side to baptize the nations, while two small fish, torn into a thousand basketfuls of morsels, fed his faint disciples. For him, too, a pole is stuck in the ground, a prop on which to hang his bloodied flesh. Infants are brought before Christ too, but he welcomes them with open arms, not greedy hands, and marks them as his own with water, not fire. Christ also is bundled off to Hades, but his return brings new life for a springtime that never ends.

 

This is the Incarnation, the Christmas story. This is God bringing himself down to our level. Infinite spirit becomes a lump of dirt, sleeps in straw, rides an ass, eats crusty bread with bunch of convicts and converts it into excrement, pours out blood, tears, toil and sweat so that the blinded, self-satisfied, juvenile inhabitants of this terrestrial ball might get the message. Men had turned from the contemplation of God above, and were looking for Him in the opposite direction, down among created things and things of sense. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image made in the form of corruptible man, and of birds, and four-footed animals and creeping things—beetles, cats, vultures, or sacred cows. So he gave them what they wanted: an image made in the form of corruptible man, water, wine, and crusty bread.

 

The Incarnation is part of God’s lesson plan, an unforgettable object lesson that God, the great teacher, uses to teach the lazy ignorant pupils of this world about his glory. The fire-filled heavens and the wine-dark sea, in all their majestic expanse, fell short of teaching men the glory of the Lord. The revolution of the seasons, with their riot of fruit trees and flowers, the amber waves of grain and the vineyards heavy with grapes could not convince them of God’s providential care. So God at last taught them Himself, face to face, in the form of a lowly carpenter from Galilee, a carpenter who holds the Pleiades in his hand.

While Christ walked and talked, ate and drank, slept, wept, or prayed, Christ also upheld the universe, governed the tides, beheld all the works of men, and spoke face to face with his Father. For the human flesh of Jesus that housed a human soul also housed the eternal Word. In Christ infinite and finite, heaven and earth came together, so that Christ was at once bounded in human flesh and also bounded all the universe within himself.

Unravel this paradox, please. When Christ asked the crowds clustering around him, “Who touched me?” didn’t he already know? When he lifted a cup of water to his mouth, was he not already upholding that cup and sustaining the life-giving power of the water within it? When he looked up to see his disciples coming towards him, did he not already behold with his divine vision all men upon earth? Christ forfeited none of these powers when he clothed them with skin, bones, and hair, yet he lived among us as one of us.

When he wished to build a table, he used his hands and shaped the wood with human tools. When he wished to speak, his lips and tongue formed his breath into the guttural consonants of Hebrew and Aramaic. When he wished to die, he bled, he gasped, he hung his head and went cold like countless millions before him. Somehow Christ sacrificed neither his heavenly power nor his earthy weakness, but dwelt both beyond his body and within it. No piece of his divine power was chipped away when he became man, nor was there any stain of weakness on it. No, it was the other way around. Man was made strong, human flesh was purified by contact with the eternal Word. The sun does not cease to shine in the darkness, but makes the gloom bright with its rays. So the presence of God himself illumined all the world and all mankind with its glorious rays.

 

So then in his human body, Christ did the works of a man, eating, sleeping, talking and breathing as any other man, so that there could be no question over whether he was truly enfleshed. The Gnostics, then, and all such heretics, must not have read the Gospel accounts, with their talk of Christ’s thirst and hunger, his touch and his spit, his blood and his sweat. Yet because this flesh was the home of God himself, its works were far more than merely human works. It was like a sponge soaked in Godness, ready to pour forth the works of divinity at any moment. And so these two hands sutured a severed ear with no stitches or superglue, returned the light of creation into darkened eye-sockets without the use of any lasers, endlessly replicated the molecules of five pieces of bread and two small fish, and transformed H2O into grape-flavored C2H6O, without a centrifuge or any laboratory rats. When Christ’s vocal cords vibrated, they probably made about the same sound that he heard when Peter’s vibrated. But Christ’s breath had the power to halt the fierce breath of the tempest, to recall breath to lifeless lungs, and to banish the spirits who held a young boy in bondage. By their fruits you shall know them, Christ himself said, but who ever saw a tree like his? The leaves and bark were man’s, but the fruit was that of God himself.

Thus the invisible God shined through the shell of human flesh and human life, as through a veil, making known the presence of God in man and among men.

 

The sun-browned Nile-dwellers in the kingdom of the pyramids may have watched for millennia for proof that their pharaohs were sons of the gods, but it only took the centurion a few hours to whisper in wonder, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”